Well, I did briefly mention that the fan theories surrounding Gaster were pretty crazy. Thanks for providing an example. "Check it out, the character named SANS uses SERIFS in his sleep this must be meaningful and btw flowers" is a good choice.

Edit: Gaster autocorrects to Faster giving credence to my idea that Gaster is somehow related to Sonic the Hedgehog, hold on while I pin the strands of yarn to various pictures on this bulletin board and I'll have all the details for you.

The sane suspicion is that Toby Fox purposefully left things vague to encourage fans to come up with wild imaginings. Of course, there may be more craziness buried deep in the game files *somewhere*, but that way lies madness.

The only thing I would commit to for sure is that when Gaster's journal refers to "you two" almost certainly one of those is Sans and that Sans used to work for (with?) Gaster. Those seem pretty solid at this point.

When you finish a Genocide mode run, the game puts system_information_962 in your game folder to indicate that you only get the black void on startup. Once you agree to sell Frisk's soul to the First Child, you get system_information_963, allowing the game to be played but forever corrupting your Pacifist run endings.

The two files are as difficult as it can be to shed. Delete them, and some backup somewhere will replace them. Remove all trace of them from your system, and Steam cloud backup will happily put them right back. Uninstall and reinstall the game and they'll be waiting for you right where you left them.

The contents of the file can be edited, but that doesn't matter. The game just checks to see if they're present, and if so, knows you've been a murderous jerk.

The simplest solution is to change the security settings on the file to deny the game read-access. If you can't undo a Genocide run completely, you can at least shove the First Child back into his ethereal, back-of-Frisk's mind state. I mean, the game goes full meta about my habits as a player, so it hardly feels unfair to meta right back with the administrator access to my own PC.

There are a couple things missing from the LP, I'll grant, but I'm just about ready to declare this one in the can.

One of them I am... er... well, I must profusely apologize, because I keep forgetting it's even there to go see. So here's someone else dealing with it:

It's the last Kickstarter backer. The artist for Ava's Demon put in Muffet. Somebody else added Glyde. The last backer put in... his own fursona.

This addition has been so unpopular with the fandom that a rumor spread that killing So Sorry won't affect a Pacifist run, that the character is so terrible you can still get a good ending to the game even if you murder it. It isn't true, but that's a pretty good indication of how people feel about these things.

The other thing is that damned stubborn door in Snowdin:

You access this room by dodging all of the names in the Special Thanks section of the Pacifist ending. And I can't do that! I've tried. Several times. I mean, the patterns are simpler than those of fighting Undyne the Undying or Sans, but it's not like I got through those fights without a scratch. Touching even one name in the credits sequence keeps the door locked.

The Annoying Dog is Toby Fox's self-insert character, and the door in Snowdin leads to the dev room. You can try to fight the dog, but can't until a few holes are "patched"...

I am an ultimate optimist, so I choose to believe, somewhere deep deep in the game, there is a way to save Asriel from the hell that the first child put him in. It probably doesn't exist, but I want to believe it is there.

Well, that was a trip and a half, and another half, and another half, and let's just call it a bunch of trips. I probably would have moved on to something else after one ending, without ever really knowing how complex and intricate the whole enterprise is. So yeah, above and beyond, my good fellow!

I kind of get the idea behind those extremely-low-random-chance events, in that the vast majority of players could only experience the whole game in community with a buttload of other players also trying stuff. I honestly find that sort of thing fascinating; I'm not particularly driven to participate myself, but it's still compelling to witness that sort of social exploration. It speaks much of the quality of the game that it drives such passion, but it's also clearly the author's passion echoing into the audience's passion, at the source.

Aaaaanyway, splendid work as always, and much gratitude for saving hours of my life. :D

McDohl wrote:I am an ultimate optimist, so I choose to believe, somewhere deep deep in the game, there is a way to save Asriel from the hell that the first child put him in. It probably doesn't exist, but I want to believe it is there.

It does seem like the worst sort of crime that the happiest ending you can get still leans on the martyring and eternal suffering of what was once the game's universe's most innocent and self-sacrificing character, but that the worst possible ending is so overweening that it overrides any possible good endings at all, in perpetuity.